• I'm Robert McLuhan, and this is the website for my book Randi's Prize: What sceptics say about the paranormal, why they are wrong and why it matters. You can read excerpts here.
  • The site also provides extra information about the topics discussed in the book, with descriptions of the academic research and links to online articles (click ‘research’ under the banner).
  • The blog contains selected posts first published on Paranormalia (www.paranormalia.com), commenting on books and events that relate to psi research, near-death experiences, past-life memories, etc, with special reference to scientific controversies and the wider social, spiritual and religious contexts.

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Near-death Experiences

There is a substantial literature on near-death experiences, including online articles and research.

Key books by scientific researchers are Kenneth Ring, Life At Death and Heading toward Omega; Michael Sabom, Light and Death and Recollections of Death; and Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light. Other books are listed below. See also this bibliography.

An influential study is by Pim van Lommel et al, Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands, which can be read in full here. See also Pim van Lommel, About the Continuity of Our Consciousness and a press report about the research.

Books by experiencers include Dannion Brinkley Saved by the Light, George G. Ritchie, Return from Tomorrow and Betty J. Eadie, Embraced By The Light.

A key sceptic text is Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live. This article by Dr. Jason J Braithwaite for the UK Skeptic magazine also argues against the survivalist interpretation of the ndear-death experience. For a critique of Blackmore's 'dying brain' hypothesis see this article by Greg Stone. See also Titus Rivas, Survivalist Interpretation of Recent  Studies into the Near-Death Experience.

This article by Keith Augustine provides a very full set of arguments against viewing the near-death experience as a glimple of the afterlife. See counter-comments by Michael Prescott.

Anesthesiologist GM Woerlee is another sceptic - podcast and transcript of an interview here.

The International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS) publishes news and articles on near-death research.

There is a useful chapter on near-death experiences in Edward Kelly et al, Irreducible Mind, which summarises the research and counters common sceptical objections

Michael Persinger claims to have demonstrated typical psychic experiences, including the sense of being outside the body, by activating a stimulus to the temporal lobe: The Paranormal: Mechanisms and Models

Some other books on near-death experiences, dying and related phenomena

Bruce Greyson and Charles P. Flynn (eds.), The Near-Death Experience: Problems,
Prospects, Perspectives

Stanislav Grof and Joan Halifax, The Human Encounter With Death

R.E.L. Masters and Jean Houston, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience

Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili, Vince Rause, Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying

Raymond Moody, Life after Life

Kenneth Ring, Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-death Experience

Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind

Kenneth Ring, The Omega Project: Near-Death Experiences, Ufo Encounters, and Mind at Large

Penny Sartori, The Near-death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients: A Five-year Clinical Study. See my brief discussion at Paranormalia ('Just Coincidence', June 13, 2008) 

See also a press release on Sam Parnia's ongoing research.

A wikipedia article has more references. This large website contains a number of first-person accounts, as well as useful supplementary information.



Sceptics' experiences

John Wren Lewis, a vocal atheist, dismissed all kinds of mystical leanings as 'neurosis' until he had a near-death experience as a result of food poisoning. The experience was devoid of imagery, which in others he continues to consider imaginary, but nevertheless was profoundly changed by it. He writes:  I cannot and do not dismiss all those mutually contradictory accounts of meeting deceased relatives as mere delusion. For although my own experience included nothing like that, and left me very doubtful about any ordinary kind of personal immortality, the timeless depth of what I have come to call eternity-consciousness brings a sense of unity with all beings past and present every bit as real - indeed far more real - than the relationships which characterized life for me during my previous fifty-nine-odd years.'

Atheist philosopher Freddie Ayer describes his near-death experience here. SThis newspaper article reports on a conversation with a hospital doctor who claimed to have attended Ayers at the time, and that Ayers confided to him that he has 'seen a supernatural being' and would have to revise all his ideas.

This newspaper interview of novelist Fay Weldon discusses her near-death experience.

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  • SOME REVIEWER COMMENTS
  • ‘A brisk, bracing look at this continuing controversy, exhaustively researched .. a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in parapsychology and its critics.’‘
  • ‘‘Packed with accurate information while at the same time surprisingly engaging and fun to read.’‘
  • ‘‘This is one book that gives a completely objective review of skeptical debunking, and spells out in detail a clear pattern of chicanery which pervades a well-funded and organized campaign against all psi research.’‘

  • ‘These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in.’ Alan Turing, computer scientist.

  • ‘I have noticed that if a small group of intelligent people, not supposed to be impressed by psychic research, get together and such matters are mentioned, and all feel that they are in safe and sane company, usually from a third to a half of them begin to relate exceptions. That is to say, each opens a little residual closet and takes out some incident which happened to them or to some member of their family, or to some friend whom they trust and which they think odd and extremely puzzling.’ Walter Prince, psychic researcher.

  • ‘Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.’ Thomas Henry Huxley

  • When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Arthur C. Clarke

  • We can always immunize a theory against refutation. There are many such immunizing tactics; and if nothing better occurs to us, we can always deny the objectivity – or even the existence – of the refuting observation. Those intellectuals who are more interested in being right than in learning something interesting but unexpected are by no means rare exceptions. Karl Popper, on the defenders of materialism.

  • The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, ‘But how can it be like that?’ which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar….Do not keep saying to yourself…‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will get…into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Richard Fenyman

  • If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative. Arthur C. Clarke.

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